A Peep Into the Yoruba Paradigm in Wole Soyinka's a Dance of The

IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science (JHSS) ISSN: 2279-0837, ISBN: 2279-0845. Volume 2, Issue 2 (Sep-Oct. 2012), PP 06-11 www.iosrjournals.org The politics of Cultural Revalidation and Retrieval: A peep into the Yoruba paradigm in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. Pinky Isha (Department of English, Milli Al-Ameen College,University of Calcutta, India.) Abstract: This research paper attempts to study and discover the patterns of myth and religious interfaces in Wole Soyinka’s drama A Dance of the Forests. Soyinka has traditionally been allied to an elitist and western European canon of writing. But in A Dance we see how the European traditions of word drama and the African tradition of performance combine to form a unique combination; the aesthetics of a cultural hybridization which can be enthralling in its impact and widely documentary. Does A Dance qualify as a regional drama or does it exude resonances beyond its demographic margins? Soyinka’s play can be seen as a universal drama of the human kind with an engrossing theme, the preponderance of evil and corruption in private and public spheres of existence. This paper attempts to show how the treatment of this theme and stylistic techniques employed are equally dynamic and challenging. Keywords: mythic, oral, religion, satire, Yoruba. The thesis of the paper is as follows: African literature is characterized by several dominant strands of influence and literary paradoxes both in its oral and written mores and this has evolved from the continent‘s long history tinctured by the famous traditions of storytelling and performance aesthetics; Africa ‗s classical traditions going back to the most ancient times in civilization. It was precisely towards the end of the 20th C that African literature received world wide acclaim and recognition due to a systematized process of study and debate fostered by institutions of education and interpretation. Thus African literature is simultaneously old and timeless besides acclimatizing itself to the global pressures of change and flux. The desire for a distinct cultural and racial identity free from white European domination lay behind much written and oral literary phenomenon. Some of the most compelling literary works of African origin is reminiscent of the most formidable events in Africa‘s political fortunes, most notably those related to slavery and colonialism. The documentation of South African literature in its initial stages, apart from slave narratives which tried to reclaim memories lost in the process of enslavement; passed through the hands of white settler Europeans who depicted Africa according to White Eurocentric standards of judgment and analysis. Africa became metaphorically the site for desire, the imperial frontier where British superiority was asserted, and Africans viewed as objects of fear and revulsion. Adventure romance and novels like Douglas Blackburn‘s A Burger’s Quixote, 1903 and Sarah Gertrude Millin‘s God’s Stepchildren, 1924 are vibrant reminders of such writings. The dawn of the 20th C till the establishment of the Apartheid state created a conscious awareness and platform for the negotiation of colonial Englishness pacifying in some measure the demands of a heightened native and local literature. The poetry of Roy Campbell in this regard tried to endorse African themes within a strictly European perspective. What we can convincingly call modern African literature evolved through the institutions of Christianity, the school and later the university. But while this may be true on its own grounds, forms of creative expression in Africa developed outside the confines of colonialism, and the continent‘s living heritage of oral forms provide an indelible record of an autonomous tradition at work which reached its highest point in the decades of decolonization during the 1950s and 60s when the majority of African countries were becoming independent from foreign rule. Thus literature of this time celebrated the coming into being of a new African nation and with it the assertion of a distinct racial and cultural identity. What was ironic was that by the 1960s, literary narratives in the new liberated environment did not adhere to the utopian ideal that many writers and intellectuals had anticipated; this was because institutions of the colonial past camouflaged themselves and thrived on the very superstructure of decolonization. The continued domination of the African nation by western political and economic interests gave rise to the crisis of decolonization or the crisis of post-colonialism in the 1980s and 1990s. The cultural dynamics of African literature is defined by multiple traditions and contexts instead of a single consolidated narrative tradition. This is due to innumerable indigenous history, regional and sub regional anthropological factors, ethnic resistance and linguistic as well as sociological traditions that have stood in the way of a unified African literature. The strain of modernist thought and influence on African literature has often eluded critics and led to conflicting responses. Alluding to the key tenets of modernism would entail a break with the sustaining dogmas of an African past heritage, as European modernism asserted its uniqueness by attacking 19th C traditions of realism. African writers turned to realism in an attempt to give legitimacy to the www.iosrjournals.org 6 | Page The politics of Cultural Revalidation and Retrieval: A peep into the Yoruba paradigm in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. African experience and rediscover the country‘s cultural potential and geographical energies. According to Modernism, art had a transcendent value; this was quite contrary to the scheme of ideas in traditional African society which had always been holistically linked to art (visual, performance and fine arts) as a provider of powerful signification of collective tribal or cultural affiliations. Art according to the African system of values also exercised a pedagogic function and as such could validate a wider nationalist enterprise of progress and reform. However Modernism exerted a strange cultural pull and paradox on the African sensibility as the most influential and important African writers were the products of colonial literary education that took its nourishment from European cultural texts and were at odds with the sentiments of the colonized millions. The discourse of modernism opened up new vistas for the African writer who in connection with avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s discovered their divorce with a colonial mindset and a distinctly colonial language. This significant group of African modernist writers of the 1940s and 50s discovered an idiom for rediscovering the African imagination with gusto and vigor and thereby uplifting it from the imitations of European literary forms. These influences are helpful in tracing the matrix of ideas that African sensibility embodied with the changing decades. In the late 1960s and 70s there emerged a generation of African writers who experimented with different stylistic techniques and ideas borrowed from European modernist tradition in order to express the crisis of post-colonialism. In this regard it is also necessary to state that modernism represented a radical break with the idea of realism which was somewhat allied to nationalism and both nationalism and realism were incapable of representing the crisis of post-colonialism. After the colonial regime ended, Africans vying for positions of power, displayed despotic, oppressive, anti nationalist and opportunist tendencies in their political maneuvers. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) accounts for the failure of Nationalism to live up to its ideals and the perpetual dominance of colonial strategies in the newly independent African states. He provides here a powerful but frightening picture of a failed decolonization that would drastically devastate the paradigms in art, society and culture: ―National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been.‖ (1963, New York) In some of the prominent works from the period, including writings (novels and plays) by Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ahmadou Kourouma, Ngugi wa Thiong and Wole Soyinka, what comes out is a kind of break with the neo-colonial order, a driving penchant to demythologize nationalism itself by fracturing experiences, providing multiple and dispersed responses, validating the subjective over the objective and providing conclusions achieved through the mode of parody and irony. The focus of this paper is on Wole Soyinka‘ treatment of the Yoruba paradigm in A Dance of the Forests in order to conceive the nascent possibilities of a mythical universe existing alongside the modern dilemma of freedom versus nationalism. Soyinka who became the first black writer from Africa to win the Nobel prize in 1986, has written perceptibly in all genres of literature, be it poetry, drama, autobiography, fiction or the critical essay. According to Soyinka the artist, his geographic and demographic place and the lineage of his artistic traditions are one and inseparable. The first phase of his literary activity emerged in the 60s when he returned to his native country Nigeria producing a fruitful series of works like The Lion and the Jewel (1963), A Dance of the Forests (1965), followed by The Swamp Dwellers (1964), The Trials of Brother Jero (1964, a satire on hypocritical, opportunist and shallow politicians) and the radio play Camwood on the Leaves (1973). The political fortunes of Nigeria from the mid 1960s ran into rough waters and a conscientious writer that Soyinka was, he could not remain aloof from the problems that beset the nation. His political sympathies led him to prison where he wrote a prison memoir titled The Man Died (1972) which avowedly criticized the people in administration while stressing on the role of the artist in society.

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